Britain’s most decorated Winter Olympian Lizzy Yarnold, who captured the hearts of the nation by winning consecutive skeleton gold medals in Sochi and Pyeongchang, has announced her retirement.

“I have lived out my dream and achieved far more than I ever thought possible in my 10 years in the sport,” Yarnold said, “but it’s time to move on. I am ready for a fresh challenge.”

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It has been some ride – much of it done at 80mph round icy hairpin bends on a metal sled. Yarnold’s first Olympic title came in Sochi in 2014, when she defied the weight of expectation by storming to victory. But she believes her greatest achievement came in February, when she became the first Briton to retain a Winter Olympic title, despite a serious chest infection that left her bunged up and wanting to bail out.

“I had never had a chest infection before Pyeongchang so I didn’t know what it was but I felt awful,” she says. “I didn’t want to carry on. But the team around me kept saying the right things at the right time, believing in me and keeping me in the race, even though at that point I didn’t believe in myself.”

To make things even tougher, Yarnold had only three hours’ sleep before the second day of competition and spent much of the night watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries on Netflix while doing some knitting. Yet somehow she had enough energy to produce a nerveless performance on her final run.

“My team kept me in the running and just before the fourth run, when I was 0.02sec behind, I felt like I was suddenly released. They left me at the top of the track and I was, ‘Right, Lizzy, this is your bit – you have to do it’. And I produced my best run. The other three were rubbish,” she says, laughing.

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That gold medal put Yarnold in an exclusive club all of her own with two Winter Olympic titles. Yet, remarkably, she got into skeleton only by chance, having applied for the Girls4Gold talent ID programme in 2008. The idea behind the UK Sport scheme was to mine for undiscovered talent and give young athletes the chance to try new sports. In Yarnold, a regional level heptathlete studying at the University of Gloucester, they struck gold – twice.

In the early days Yarnold used to get so tense while competing that, when she tried to eat a protein bar at the end of each run, she was unable to chew it properly because her jaw was so sore. On other occasions she also got vestibular disorder, which made her dizzy and disoriented.

After Yarnold’s success in Sochi, her teammates gave her a new nickname: OC – Olympic Champion – but her gold medal and appearances on chat shows did not change her. She was always the girl-next-door off the track and a fearless and steely competitor on it.

“I definitely had a game face,” she says. “If people are not used to seeing me in my competitive environment, it probably is a bit of a shock to them. I don’t smile. I am not going to engage in conversation and there is absolutely one job on my mind. And if I do come and talk to you I want that one piece of information from you and that’s that, and that is conversation over. To be a professional, that is how it has to be. That is one thing I probably won’t miss too much.”

The 29-year-old intends to stay in sport and has started mentoring young athletes as well as working for the British Olympic Committee’s athlete commission. She is also a frequent visitor to schools, trying her best to inspire the next generation, although she has made a pretty good fist of that already.

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“If I am able to go into a school, the pupils see I am a normal person,” she says. “I obviously had a really out‑of-this-world dream but I tell them that, if you work hard and have a great team around you, you can achieve whatever. Be a scientist. Be a flute player. Whatever you want to do just keep going with that dream, because you never know what is around the corner.”

That is something Yarnold knows all too well. After Pyeongchang she suffered two displaced discs and she was in such agony she struggled to walk and had to take what she calls an “industrial amount of painkillers” to get through the day. Thankfully she is on the mend after surgery in July.

“My back is so much better. The surgeon was phenomenal; he does a great job. I still have some pains and I still have to do lots of rehab, which is normal for spinal surgery. But I am not on any painkillers, which is amazing.”

Yarnold hopes also to work with mental health charities but for now the woman the tabloids dubbed “Queen Lizzy” has only one thing on her mind: collecting an OBE from Queen Liz on Wednesday.

“My two sisters and my husband are going to come with me and we are going to meet the whole family for an afternoon tea and really celebrate,” Yarnold says, with a smile that once more lights up the room.